Issue 14 | December 2007

The Trieste Film Festival, presented by Alpe Adria Cinema, is in its 19th year. Watching the documentaries in competition was a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the issues that preoccupy Central and Eastern Europe. Many regions in this old eastern bloc are using the opportunity of greater media freedom (or the possibility of finishing their films in safer havens as in the case of a Belarussian documentary) to explore painful histories as well as current difficult social and political circumstances.

Whether under the illusion that they are free, or that they are actually free without realising it, Fassbinders’ early bourgeois critiques pick up the mantle that Godard abandoned after Weekend, its disaffected characters, post 68, being passed the baton of urban alienation...

So much recent French cinema has striven to carve out an identity apart from the 60s and 70s nouvelle vague that Christophe Honore’s unapologetic embrace of those traditions (or anti-traditions) seems by turns quixotic, perverse and inspiring.

Films featuring the British film director, screenwriter, actor and poet Jane Arden (1927-82) are currently – and frustratingly – hard to track down. However, one film featuring Arden did find a large and enthusiastic audience in the summer of 2007 as it was shown in daily cycles at Tate Britain...

Gravel and Stones is a new thirty-minute documentary about the challenges faced by disabled people in Cambodia. It was filmed in December 2006 by four sixth form students at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, all members of a group called the Abingdon Film Unit (AFU).

Small Town Girl, directed by Jill Daniels, follows Sian, Charlotte and Joanne from 12 to 16, from 2001 to 2005. Sian lives in Frome, in the west of England, Charlotte and Joanne live in Nelson in the North West of England.